About

Contact

If you have even done as much as to glance momentarily at the news lately you will have seen stories that have been splashed across all the major newspapers and outlets; the harassment of prominent figures surrounding the #GamerGate scandal. It seems that everyone from MSNBC, CBS, The Guardian, the Washington Post and the New York Times have all spoken out against the harassment, doxxing and death threats of several key figures supporting the shut down of this movement, such as Brianna Wu, Zoe Quinn and most recently the threat of a school massacre caused by a scheduled appearance from Anita Sarkeesian.

What you probably didn’t see was the doxxing, harassment and death threats sent to the people on the other side of this argument over censorship and collusion in the media, those supporting #GamerGate. Don’t adjust your screens, that was correct, this harassment actually goes both ways. The Pro-GamerGate victims of this abuse are very much alive and out there, they are just hidden from the mainstream media’s vast outreach. User based content on YouTube, Twitter, and personal blogs such as Tumblr have done their part to tell the story, but this coverage certainly doesn’t compete with the visibility of these larger platforms. However, harassment of people supporting #GamerGate is wide spread, key figures of this abuse are GG feminist who was doxxed multiple times for her charity drive, and Boogie, a YouTuber with almost 2million subscribers, who received doxxing and death threats towards him and his wife for the views he has expressed.

Both sides have reported and condemned this harassment and all the forms it comes in, whether it’s doxxing and death threats or even twitter and YouTube comments, so it is clear that working together on this is the best way to bring down the harassers.

Firstly, if you are harassed, threatened or doxxed in anyway, posting the metadata online can help others to find the culprit. You can find out how to do that here. This can really help people bait and search for harassers through their IP addresses. The more people get caught for this kind of behaviour the less we will see of it. While internet trolls remain anonymous they care little for their actions. Seeing real consequences for their conduct will help.

If you see a threat or a doxx towards someone else you should report it immediately. This means either reporting it to the site administrator, downvoting and otherwise trying to hide the comment to decrease its visibility. If you see obvious attempts at trolling i.e an 8chan user writing a hateful comment and then using it as an example of hate speech, who has the same ID number, then screenshot this highlighting the evidence so they can be called out for it. Many gamers have already been tackling the threats in this manner, such as the measures taken by 8chan users to bury the recent doxxing of Zoe Quinn before administrators could deal with it.

Importantly, you need to make your voice heard. Cry out loud that you and thousands of others like you will not stand for this harassment. Many people forget how important it is to show others that you are not interested in and will not stand for this kind of abusive. A strong collective voice will help silence the abusers.

The harassment needs to end before both sides can open up truthful discussion about the real issue here, which is of course corruption in journalism in case you had already forgotten. Once we move past this, the floor will be opened up to all the people fearful of speaking out in case of retribution. These news sources should be able to report on the eerie silence of #GamerGaters within the mainstream media, they should be speaking of the collusion between developers and journalists in the gaming industry, and ways in which we can encourage more females into the gaming and development industries. They should not be writing about the harassment and death threats being sent to many prominent gamers and critics, because there should not be any to write about.

Edit: The original article stated that GG Feminist was doxxed because of her letter to Kotaku, however, I’ve since been informed that it predated this letter and was actually because of her charity drive.

Share

Have a tip for us? Awesome! Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll take a look!